When I audit Google Ads accounts, I see a lot of these kinds of problems. This is only for text advertising that are based on a search. I’m not going to go into detail about shopping or display ads right now. All of this also applies to Bing Ads campaigns.

1. Campaigns are where you have complete control over your spending.

The way an account is structured is among the most common faults I encounter. Always keep in mind that you manage the budget at the campaign level. If you’re promoting a number of items or offerings, each one should have its own campaign. The explanation for this is straightforward.

Let’s pretend you’re a retailer of women’s clothes, such as shirts, jeans, socks, and shoes.

Each of those would have their own campaign. In fact, you could break it up even more. Dress shirts were the focus of one campaign. There was a t-shirt promotion. One effort to promote running tees. And so forth.

Pants are the same way. Dress pants are the focus of this advertisement. A jean’s campaign. Sweatpants are the focus of this campaign. A commercial promoting workout pants.

People frequently make the mistake of creating a single shirt campaign and then dividing things apart at the ad group level. They make a dress shirt ad group, a t-shirt ad group, and a running shirt ad group.

The issue with that structure is quite straightforward. What if your most lucrative or highest-converting shirts are dress shirts, and you want to raise your ad spend on them? If you spend more money on your t-shirt campaign, it will be spread over all of the ad groups. You won’t be able to direct the funds to a specific ad group.

You may be able to get much more granular than what I described above, depending on your inventory. You could want to create different campaigns for short-sleeve dress shirts, long-sleeve dress shirts, dress shirts for girls, and campaigns for button-down and non-button-down collars instead of just dress shirts.

Whatever method you use, remember that you control the budget at the campaign level, and any items or services for which you want complete control over ad expenditure require their own campaign.

If you have the less than average exposure to PPC, I know what you’re thinking, if you need to in the future, you can simply shift goods into their own campaign.

Yes, however you will lose the historical data (Quality Scores, conversion data, automated bidding data, ad performance, etc.). When you do that, you’re practically beginning again with a new campaign.

2. Keep your ad groups to a minimum.

Ad groups with a lot of keywords are the second most common mistake I encounter. I’ve lost track of how many accounts I’ve seen over the years with only one ad group in a campaign and all of their keywords tossed into it.

In general, each ad group should include no more than 3-5 keywords. I don’t go beyond ten.

Quality Scores and Ad Rank are the reasons behind this.

Several factors influence your Quality Scores. The most popular and crucial are: –

• Your ad’s click-through rate.
• The importance of each term in relation to its ad group and ad content.
• The quality and relevancy of your landing page.
• Performance of Google Ads accounts in the past.

With neatly crafted ad groups and landing pages, it’s easier to control those relevance criteria. The more broad your keywords are, the more difficult it is to create hyper-relevant ads and landing pages. It’s also useful for conversions. This makes it easy to communicate a consistent message from search to ad to landing page.

With Google Ads’ growing definition of exact match search queries, having a lot of diverse keywords in the same ad group is becoming less required.

Why should Quality Scores be a concern for you? That’ll be the next one.

3. Ignoring Quality Scores

Believe me, this blunder can cost you a lot of advertising money. I’ve frequently audited ad accounts and discovered a large number of search phrases with Quality Scores of 3 or less.

Google does not provide the actual formula for calculating Ad Rank, but Quality Score is a consideration. In fact, they employ a real-time Quality Score that is not shared with you and takes into account factors such as the searcher’s vicinity, the time of day, the nature of the search term, and so on.

A basic Quality Score is what we get to view and work with. This is significant since it influences how much you will pay each click. In the advertising auctions, higher Quality Scores obtain discounted placements.

Lower Quality Score means you’ll have to spend more than other advertisers to display in the same spot, and really low Quality Score means your ad won’t be shown at all.